FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg questioned about his conviction for arson
08.12.2011
09:21 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg was interviewed on BBC Radio Nottingham by Alan Clifford yesterday, about the English Riots.

Clifford quizzed Clegg on the 20% reduction in police number, his views on the rioters, and whether Clegg’s own conviction for arson at the age of 16 had given him any insight into their actions.
 

 
In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2009, Clegg said of the incident:

‘I’d drunk too much, I was irresponsible, criminal’

He revealed he had set fire, whether by accident or design was left unclear, to a prize collection of cacti. Cole Morton, who carried out the interview wrote:

First, though, I want to know if this readiness to please means he’ll confess to the unvarnished truth about an episode he once passed off as ‘a drunken prank’. My understanding is that it was much more than that. It was arson, actually. He could have gone to jail, ending his chances of a political career before it had even begun. The property he destroyed, deliberately, was priceless. Can we talk about the cactus?

‘Oh, the cactus,’ he says, placing his head in his hands for a moment, then rubbing his face. ‘I just behaved very, very badly. I was on an exchange in Germany and I drank far, far, far too much. I was a teenager. I lost it, really.’

Lost it? He does seem genuinely agitated. ‘What I mean is I was drunk…’ Yes, he said that. What on? ‘They had this beer brewed in monasteries near Munich. Kloster Andechs. Unbelievably strong. Which clearly I couldn’t take.’

Clegg was 16 years old, a public schoolboy abroad. So what happened? ‘Yeah… I, erm, I was at a party and I drifted into a greenhouse with a friend, saw it was full of cacti and lit a match to find our way, as there were no lights on. The flame accidentally touched one of the cacti, which glowed rather beautifully.’

Was it an accident, then? He looks at me. Only at first, it seems. ‘We did that to a fair number of the cacti. Not really knowing what we’d done.’

I can’t help but laugh, at the story and the look on his face, but he objects. He treated this like a joke when, cleverly, he made it public at a fringe meeting in 2007, before the leadership election. He doesn’t think it’s so funny now. ‘No, it’s not… I mean, genuinely.It was the leading collection of cacti in Germany.’

The greenhouse belonged to a professor of botany whose life’s work had been to gather and nurture exotic specimens from all over the world. ‘He’d been to the jungles of Brazil and stuff to find these cacti.’

The boys weren’t arrested, because they ran away. ‘We didn’t know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we’d drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, “We know you did this.” I came clean.’

The boys were taken off to see the professor, who was livid, but he was somehow persuaded not to press charges. ‘Instead they created a kind of community punishment for us. Me and the other bloke ended up having to dig communal flower beds in the baking sun. Then I spent the summer with my mum, going round one specialised garden centre after another, trying to replace some of the cacti. Of course they were tiny, and his were all large.’

Read the full article here .
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg warned of riots if Tories elected in 2010


 
With thanks to Mark MacLachlan
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
08.12.2011
09:21 am
|
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg warned of riots if Tories elected in 2010

image
 
Respected journalist and broadcaster, Andrew Neil posted an interesting tweet regarding comments made by the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.

Neil points out that last year, Liberal-Democrat Clegg warned of riots if the Conservatives were elected, and wonders if Clegg “ever thought he’d be in government with them when they happened?”
 

 
With thanks to Andrew Neil
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
08.09.2011
10:06 am
|
Angry Doctor ruins UK Prime Minister’s hospital visit
06.18.2011
08:36 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
A senior orthopaedic surgeon upstaged the British PM David Cameron, his Deputy, Nick Clegg and Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, during their PR visit to Guy’s Hospital in London, earlier this week.

The doctor’s anger was caused by the camera crews and press photographers who had failed to follow hospital procedure by rolling up their sleeves during the visit.

The prime minister was quick to agree with the surgeon and told the crew he thought they should “disappear”. The hospital visit came on the day that changes to plans for the NHS were announced.

Cameron and Clegg look like two schoolboys caught up to no good behind the teacher’s back.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
06.18.2011
08:36 pm
|